Tag Archives: Wicker Park

“In Life Review, Ben Murray’s solo show at Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, continues the artist’s reconnaissance of the maddeningly amorphous landscape of memory, here pinned to the walls in its most dramatic form. The “life review” is the classic, quasi-paranormal event wherein one’s life flashes before one’s eyes—in totality, crystal-clear—during a near death experience. A fictional trope and indelible fact to those who have experienced them, the life review is memory armed with the exigency of death, its celerity contrary to every little thing we imagine about ourselves—that we are some grand elegy in our total, that we are incapable of reduction to a series of scenes—when in fact we are, of course, nothing but scenes, none ever seen from the same perspective twice, singular in both our mind and the minds of others.”

“Let’s run through those amorphous associations real quick, those things which Shore’s two sets of abstract works (there are really three series here, two of which are abstract while the third, which will be parsed separately, is more representational) echo: Mesoamerican design motifs, Cretan labyrinths, late 70′s/early 80′s Japanese and American video game sprite design, collapsing stars, team sports uniform and logo design—this one is immensely important, giving the show its name and the majority of the pieces their singular characteristic—and first edition hardcover John Updike Rabbit novels, all of which come together, far more gracefully under Shore’s aegis than your reviewer’s, into some inherently approachable, pleasingly intricate, and eye-shaking works which both hum like fluorescent tubes and shimmer like DXM-induced snake skin tessellation in a dark room.”